Okay, here’s the thing: yes, you raise a good question as to whether or not doing this is worth voiding the warranty. For some people it may not be. Even if a hard drive breaks, I won’t be returning it for warranty coverage–I must know that my data has been properly discarded. I am simply not interested in any warranty for that reason. Your mileage may vary. I already strongly suggested that a user evaluate the risk of doing this.
Secondly, I’m not using Windows with this drive. Studio drives come preformatted with HFS+ for ready use with a Macintosh. However, I don’t care about that either. The end application will be a storage device for use with a FreeNAS computer system (based on FreeBSD). You can’t use any of the SmartWare with FreeBSD, and the virtual CD device appears to cause problems. The reason for buying a Studio drive was to get one with a Firewire port.
It is my fervent belief that Western Digital has an obligation to provide a straightforward, “un-fooled-around-with” external hard drive OR the option to convert a drive into plain old external mass storage device. There is nothing about these drives that would preclude them from doing so–if they’d just admit that maybe not everyone wants anything to do with SmartWare and provide a suitable removal tool.
